Margin has so many meanings

I should enjoy this movie since I’m in it.
There's no plot and characters fall out
Like lemonade on a hot day.
My thirst rinsed from the glass.

Another day and the shoot is ruined.
It’s raining gray disbelief as
The cherry tree tips in a storm.
A friend's father drives off the road avoiding a deer.
Memories rinse through the mind.

Sometimes the extras get in the way.
Keats coughs arterial blood and sees his death
Suddenly I’m in Italy, buying cappuccino,
weeping for this boy/man.
A radio tells me to get up for work.

Then it’s Friday evening at a friend’s.
I’m flipping a coffee table book on Presidents.
Martha keeps to herself for an hour each morning.
She burns every letter from George
after he dies, she moves to an attic room.

Jefferson rides his horse for hours
trying to outrun migraines,
and promises his dying wife never to remarry
but cannot keep his heart from wanting.
Who are these red-haired slaves at Monticello?

My grad school friend switches
from marketing to theology
flogged by hours watching TV ads for research
He drinks liters of scotch
to ground himself from images pawing his mind.

I remember the little girl in Ireland
holding my hand as we walk to church
long after I stopped going to mass.

I see a river of Holland tulips blooming late April
and return to a ferry ride to Denmark
eating Toblerones by the rail.

And I still feel his dark sobbing
from a couch in the living room
Knowing now that his father will slowly save him
from this grief.

Or the sting of a forgotten friend's name
rushing at my windshield during a traffic jam in Cambridge.

Or the dulling smell of gas pumping as I stopped on my way
to the hospital where she was no more.

Or that moment when there was sky and no clouds
and something like a bird threads my eyesight.

All these belong on the cutting floor
I sweep and sweep without wincing.
The in-between episodes.
The shameless breath of it all.
The demands for everything of me.
The pretense and reality exhaled.

I will be sad if I think this way any more
So I let it all slide and slide
Until a margin of comfort breaks through late at night
Always late at night when the window sill and a night sky
Know I am awake.

margins hold so many meanings.